Eifelheim (41 page)

“Then nothing was done to those Krenken who set out with the Herr?”

He shrugged. “They’ve not returned.”

D
IETRICH RODE
to St. Catherine, where he found a score of Krenken in uneven rows in the nave. Some were on their feet, others in their characteristic squat. Three perched in the rafters. Joachim was in the pulpit while a thick-set Krenk wearing a head-harness translated for those who lacked one.

“Where is Hans?” Dietrich asked into the silence that greeted his entrance.

Joachim shook his head. “I’ve not seen him since the army left.”

One of the squatting Krenken buzzed and the thickset one said through the
mikrofoneh
, “The Beatice asks whether Hans lives. It is,” he added with the Krenkish smile, “a weighty matter to her.”

“His band performed valiantly in the conflict,” Dietrich told him. “One alone was slain and Hans avenged him in a most Christian manner. Please excuse me, I must find him.”

He had turned away when Joachim called, “Dietrich!”

“What?”

“Which of them was killed?”

“The one called Gerd.”

This announcement, when translated, caused a great deal of clicking and buzzing. A Krenk began sawing his arms violently and repeatedly. Others reached out in quick, tentative touches, as if tapping his shoulder for his attention. Joachim, too, descended from the pulpit, and imitated the Krenkish gesture. “Blessed are those who mourn,” Dietrich heard him say, “for they shall be comforted. Sorrow is a moment, but joy is joy forever in God’s presence.”

Outside, Dietrich remounted and tugged the reins around. “Come, then, sister horse,” he said, “I must call on your service this one last time.” Kicking the horse in the ribs, he rode for the Great Woods, sending up urgent clots of mud from the sodden Bear Valley road.

H
E FOUND
Hans in the Krenkish vessel. The four surviving Krenken clustered in a small room lined with metal boxes on the lower level. The room’s walls were scorched, and no wonder. Each box had rows of small, glass-filled windows, within which small fires burned—bright red; dull blue. Some changed colors while Dietrich watched. Other windows were dark and the box itself marred by the
fires that had wrecked the ship. One box was ruined utterly, its panels bent and twisted, so that Dietrich could see that inside were many wires and small items. It was on this box that Gottfried labored with his magic wand.

He must have moved, for the Krenken turned suddenly. The Krenkish eye, Dietrich had learned, was especially sensitive to motion. When Dietrich pulled his head-harness from his scrip, Hans sprang across the room and slapped the
mikrofoneh
from his hands. Then, gripping Dietrich’s wrist, led him up the stairwell to the room where they had first met. There Hans activated the “speakers.”

“Gschert controls the waves-in-no-medium,” the Krenk told him, “but this head talks only in this room. How did you know to find us here?”

“You were not at Falkenstein, nor seen by any in the village. Where else might you have gone?”

“Then Gschert does not yet know. The voice-canals falling under interdict forwarned us of trouble. And we had Gerd to bury and the wire to install.” Hans tossed his long arm. “It is cold here, but … I understand now what your people mean by ‘sacrifice.’ You went to the battlefield?”

“Your countrymen fought over your actions, and I thought to warn you. I feared you would return to imprisonment, or worse.” He hesitated. “The Herr said you forgave the man who killed Gerd.”

Hans tossed his arm. “We needed the wire, not his death. This wire, drawn by a true copper-smith, may prove meet to the task. No blame to the blessed Lorenz. Copper was not his duty. Come, let us return below. Remember, only Gottfried is with us in all things. Friedrich and Mechtilde have joined only from fear of the alchemist, not from next-love.”

D
IETRICH WATCHED
for a time as the four Krenken attached wires and touched them with sundry talismans—perhaps to bless them with some relic? Once or twice they
seemed to argue, and consulted illuminated manuscripts of the “elektronik circuit.” He tried to discern which of the other two was Mechtilde, obviously a Krenkerin, but though he studied them closely, he could spy no marked difference.

Growing bored, he walked about within the vessel and came to the room that the Kratzer had once named the pilot room, though there was no window to show the pilot how the vessel lay, only panels of opaque glass, several of them darkened as if by fire. One of these flickered briefly to life, accompanied by a clatter of Krenkish voices from farther below.

A padded high-seat in the center marked the captain’s throne, from which he had issued orders to his lieutenants. Dietrich wondered what might have happened had that worthy survived. The captain might not have failed so badly as Gschert. Yet, being more competent than Gschert, might he not have, in typical Krenkish choler, rid himself of the risk of discovery by ridding himself of the discoverers?

God worked all things to an end. What purpose was served by the events that had so joined a reclusive scholarpriest with a bizarre creature that instructed talking heads?

Dietrich left the pilot’s room and went to the outer door, where he breathed the fresh air. A distant cry echoed through the surrounding trees, and he thought at first that it was a hawk. But it was too prolonged and insistent, and it suddenly came clear: the whinny of a terrified horse.

Dietrich spun about and ran to the stairwell, nearly tripping on his robe as he hurried down the steps. “Gschert comes!” he cried, but they looked at him not at all and he realized that a human voice was to them no more than a sound, as their chittering was to him. So he grabbed Hans by the forearm.

Reflexively, the Krenk slung him aside. Hans turned and Dietrich could think of nothing better than to point toward the stairwell and shout, “Gschert!” hoping that the creature had heard the name often enough to recognize it without translation.

It must have worked, for Hans froze for a moment before unleashing a stream of chatter at his comrades. Friedrich and Mechtilde put aside their tools and sprang for the stairwell, pulling
pots de fer
from their scrips as they did. Gottfried looked up from his work with the magic wand and, first waving away the vapors with his hand, made the tossing motion toward Hans. Hans waited a moment longer, then tilted his head as far back as he could before he, too, ran up the stairwell.

Dietrich found himself alone with Gottfried, his first convert—unless one counted the alchemist’s cryptic embrace of the words of Consecration. Gottfried continued to affix wires to the minute posts with his solidare-metal, but Dietrich thought him aware of being watched. Gottfried put the wand aside on a pad that appeared woven of metal fibers and, using a screw-twister, removed a small box from the “circuit.” This, he tossed to Dietrich, who perforce must catch it, and put in its place a somewhat larger device that appeared built from odds and ends. Examining the device removed, Dietrich saw that instead of copper wires there depended from the device sundry fibers so fine as a hair and which seemed to trap light within themselves.

Gottfried clacked his mandibles and gestured to the device Dietrich now held and the more
schlampig
device he had installed in its place. He spread his hands in a very human gesture, and tossed his head several times, by which Dietrich understood that Gottfried doubted the
elektronikos
would flow through the copper wires with the same efficacy as—light?—had once flowed through the hairlike fibers.

Having thus pantomimed his doubts, Gottfried made the sign of the cross and, bending once more to the task, dismissed Dietrich with a wave of his arm.

D
IETRICH FOUND
Hans outside, crouched with the other two Krenken behind some metal barrels. Hans seized Dietrich’s robe and pulled him too behind the barrels, where the sodden earth soaked his garments and chilled his limbs. The Krenken, he saw, were shivering, although the day was
but moderately cool to Dietrich’s senses. He unfastened his cloak and hung it around Hans’s shoulders.

Hans cocked his head to look at Dietrich straight. Then, he handed the cloak to the Krenk squatting beside him. This one—Mechtilde, Dietrich thought—took it and wrapped it tightly around her, clenching it close about her throat. The third Krenk squatted partly upright, peering over the tops of the barrels. Where a man might scan the surroundings, he held his head so motionless as a gargoyle. The better to apprehend motion within the woods, Dietrich supposed. From time to time, the third Krenk absently fingered his neck.

The horse had stopped her whinnies, by which Dietrich thought the beast had fled—unless Gschert had slain it. He raised his head to look toward the woods and a sound like a bumblebee flew past him, followed a moment later by a sharp crack from the edge of the woods and the slap of a stone against the vessel behind him. Hans yanked Dietrich once more to the dirt and snapped his mandibles a thumb’s-length from his face. The message was clear: Make no sudden moves. Dietrich glanced at Friedrich and noticed that his left antenna had bent slightly to point toward a spot in the surrounding forest. Hans crossed his antennae and, ever so slowly, eased his
pot de fer
into position to sling a bullet at his attackers.

Hans raised a great clatter with his horny side-lips, and was answered by similar buzz from the concealing forest. Dietrich pulled the head-harness from his scrip and shook it at Hans before strapping it into place.

“I told him,” Hans announced when he too had donned the harness, “that his bullets would damage our only means of escape. But he worries less over our escape than over my obedience. When a man can accomplish nothing, such pride is all that is left him.”

Because his private canal had been interdicted, Hans had spoken on the common canal, no longer concerned with being overheard. Gschert answered, saying, “I command, heretic. Your place is to serve.”

“Truly, I was born to serve. But I serve
all
on this voyage, and not you alone. You so fear risking
one
of us, that you would lose
all
of us. If you command here, your command is that we die. You were our captain’s left hand, but without the head, the hand knows not what to grasp.”

In answer, another bullet was flung at them. This time, it made no slapping noise, but instead a sound like planting a foot into deep mud. Dietrich looked over his shoulder and gasped, for the Krenkish vessel glowed with a soft, internal, sourceless light,
through which Dietrich could see the trees on the other side of the ship!
Hastily, he crossed himself. Could the inanimate have ghosts? As he watched, the vessel seemed to shrink, as if it were moving away.

Hans and the others had seen as well. Friedrich and Mechtilde buzzed, and Hans said, as if to himself, “Take care, Gottfried … Keep it plumb …” Then, to Gschert: “Where is our pilot? He ought to be here to take the helm!”

“Your heresy has sundered the Web. Zachary would not come. Would you trust your life to such patchwork? Even should it drop into the Other World, will it climb forth again?”

“Then, it is at least a choice of deaths, and not the least of choices.”

Fear gripped Dietrich’s heart and the hairs on his head and arms began to curl. The Krenkish ship snapped suddenly into focus in its proper size and a wave of
elektronikos
passed through him and across the clearing, where corposants flickered briefly from the tips and edges of picks and poles and sundry other metal objects.

The yellow glow behind Hans’s eyes seemed to dim. “Ah, Gottfried,” he said.

The one called Friedrich turned on him with his
pot de fer
leveled. He clicked out some statement. Dietrich heard only the answer. “‘A small leap begins a long journey.’” Friedrich hesitated, then lowered his weapon. He said something else, but Hans did not answer him.

Without warning, Gottfried appeared in the doorway of
the vessel and leapt across the open area to where Hans and Dietrich crouched. He was wearing his head-harness. “I should have asked your blessing on the twisting-device, father. Perhaps it was lacking only that.”

Hans placed a hand on his forearm. “The work fell short by only a little,” he said.

Gottfried said, “Bwa! So said the hunter at Stag’s Leap.” Then he hopped atop the metal drums behind which they crouched and, spreading wide his arms, cried out, “This is my body!”

Hans pulled him to the mud a moment before a swarm of bullets flew through the space. “Those fools,” Hans said. “If they damage the walls, the vessel will never sail. We must—We must—” His body made a noise like a concertine, for the Krenken possessed many small mouths about their bodies. “Ach. Will the warm-time never come?”

“Always summer comes,” Dietrich said. To Gottfried, he added, “You must not despair and throw your life away because of one failure.”

“His was not an act of despair,” Hans told Dietrich, “but one of hope.” Then, his momentary panic having left him, he concluded, “We must remove the Herr Gschert.”

“That saying is easier for you than for us,” Gottfried said. “You serve the Kratzer, and are not ‘oath-bound’ to the ship’s master as are we. Yet, though it grieves me sore to bring him low, it must be done.”

“How many has he brought?”

“Bwa! By the evidence, all but Zachary.”

Thereafter moved a strange and a slow combat. Accustomed to joust and melee, Dietrich found the affair most peculiar, for the combatants maintained perfect stillness for long periods. His companions behind the barrels seemed statues, but statues that moved imperceptibly. Each time he looked at Hans, the servant of the talking head had moved into a different position. Such a style, he realized, must perfectly suit a nation whose eyes were responsive to motion, for perfect motionlessness would
make them difficult to see. Yet it must also put them at hazard when fighting those who attack in a rush. It occurred to Dietrich that had Gschert and Manfred fought on Kermis Day, each party would have been vulnerable to the other. For to remain still in the face of a charge were fatal; while to rush against those with keen perception of movement were equally so.